Nehalem - Everything You Need to Know about Intel's New Architecture
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 3, 2008 1:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Not Another Conroe
Comparing Conroe to Pentium 4 was night-and-day, the former was such a radical departure from the NetBurst micro-architecture that seemingly everything was done differently. The Pentium 4 needed a tremendous amount of software optimization to actually extract performance from that chip, Intel has since learned its lesson and no longer expects the software community to re-compile and re-optimize code for every new architecture. Nehalem had to be fast out of the box, so it was designed that way.
Conroe was the first Intel processor to introduce this 4-issue front end. The processor could decode, rename and retire up to four micro-ops at the same time. Conroe’s width actually went under utilized a great deal of the time, something that Nehalem did address, but fundamentally there was no reason to go wider.
Intel introduced macro-ops fusion in Conroe, a feature where two coupled x86 instructions could be “fused” and treated as one. They would decode, execute and retire as a single instruction instead of two, effectively widening the hardware in certain situations.
Nehalem added additional instructions that could be fused together, in addition to all of the cases supported in existing Core 2 chips:
The other macro-ops fusion enhancement is that now 64-bit instructions can be fused together, whereas in the past only 32-bit instructions could be. It’s a slight performance improvement but 64-bit code could see a performance improvement on Nehalem.
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qurious69ss - Friday, August 22, 2008 - link
You sound like one of those sad fanboys from amdzone. Tell dimentia to get a life.X1REME - Friday, August 22, 2008 - link
wow, this whole cpu is a copy of a amd cpu and you expect amd fan boys to not get amd with you, secondly this fantasy is baseless until you can compare it to an offering from the AMD team (Shanghai & Deneb). AMD is still KING with there OPTERON and most likely will be in the future with there new cpu coming soon for the server and also for the desktop.DigitalFreak - Friday, August 22, 2008 - link
Learn to spell, you goober.X1REME - Friday, August 22, 2008 - link
OK DORK, am sure you have never made a mistake (there=their) Duh. I bet your some kid all hyped up for the i7 who wishes Xmas comes early lol. Anyway it’s not a desktop chip, it’s a sever chip DUH. It’s meant to compete with the AMD Opteron chip (the best). Although Opteron will lose its crown, it won’t be to i7 but to Shanghai (AMD new latest and greatest). And like I said b4, Deneb will clear anything up out of place.The reason amd does not grab a microphone and star shouting at the top of their voice is because amd doesn't have the resources and money in comparison with Intel. If it reveals too much about its future strategy and Intel likes that strategy (like the Opteron, HT, On-board mem etc) there is a big theoretical chance that Intel could take this idea and deliver a product well before AMD. So it’s not over until amd says its.
snakeoil - Thursday, August 21, 2008 - link
nehalem fails,it was supposed to be superior to core 2, intel was against the wall this time, why?, because, the old front bus architecture was lagging more more in the server arena and becoming a bottleneck ,compared to hypertransport, so intel is forced to abandon the front side bus, but the strong point of core 2 is that because you don't have and integrated memory controller you can stuff the processor with a huge L2 cache.so, nehalem sucks in gaming,there is no way that the enthusiast is going to pay more for a processor that produce less fps that they actually have.
and the hyperthreading is a risky move, hypertrheading is known por being power hungry, and although produce gains in some applications,some servers applications actually runs slower, so in many cases the old hyperthreading had to be disabled.
nehalem is crippled for the enthusiast,and the regular user.
nuff said.
AssBall - Saturday, August 23, 2008 - link
You musta missed where Anand says several times its not intended for better gaming? It will be significantly faster than Penryn for multithreaded applications. I guess I don't see how this makes it "fail". Maybe in your fantasy world where 90% of the CPU market are "enthusiasts".snakeoil - Saturday, August 23, 2008 - link
enthusiasts drive the market you fruityassUnlimitedInternets36 - Saturday, August 23, 2008 - link
LOL this year Satan err Santa is going to take away your PC because you don't deserve to have one anymore You Jaded nerd.Gasaraki88 - Friday, August 22, 2008 - link
Thanks! I never knew there was a expert on CPU design in the house. I've learn so much from your well researched, tested and thought out comment...pool1892 - Friday, August 22, 2008 - link
first of all the enthusiast market is a very tiny niche, it would not kill intel if you were right.but you are not. the L2 of penryn (and banias) is much more like the nehalem L3 than the nehalem L2. and if you have a single threaded game it now has 8mb at similar latencies, but with a second buffer, the 256k L2, and a MUCH smaller cache miss penalty.
concerning hyperthreading: please read the article first. nehalem switches off what it does not need, powerwise. and about fiftytwo other very vaild arguments.